Airdate: Sleep Clinic

If you’re someone who has trouble getting a good night’s sleep, this could be the show for you.

Sleep Clinic will look at the weird, and not so wonderful, sleep patterns that disrupt thousands of people. From loud talkers, to night terrors, errant limbs, narcolepsy, epilepsy, cataplexy -and one man known as “the howler.”

The four part British series, filmed at Papworth Hospital, near Cambridge, has dealt with 80 different sleep disorders.

It premieres 8pm Wednesday October 15 on ABC2.

Press Release:We all like to see what others get up to in bed.

Although all humans do it, and millions have trouble with it, sleep remains a mystery zone, largely ignored by medical science.

Sleep Clinic is a compelling, funny and startling look at the wild and weird array of sleep disorders that plague us. Taken with infra-red photography, of patients at an exclusive British sleep clinic, this series reveals some bizarre night time behaviour.

There’s parasomniacs, narcoleptics, sleep eaters, sleepwalkers, people with restless leg syndrome, idiopathic hypersomnia and nocturnal epilepsy and that old chestnut, obstructive sleep apnoea. Their stories show people close to breaking point for whom sleep has become a nightmare.

Episode 1: October 15, 8pm. At the busiest sleep centre in Britain, Papworth Hospital, near Cambridge, some of the strangest of the 80-odd sleep disorders, present among its 3000 patients a year.

Patients are wired up with sensors for brain waves, chest movements and chin muscle tone and filmed with an infra-red camera. By the end of the night, after watching some extraordinary antics from sleepwalking to screaming to thrashing about like a landed fish, there’s little that Papworth clinicians doesn’t know about their “strap heads”- that is patients’- night’s sleep.

Jody who sees galloping ponies and talks loudly and often in her sleep, causes up to five disruptions a night to her partner, Jim.

Malcolm has his wife, Shirley, at her wits’ end with his moaning -not quite the way you’d expect, ‘though. It’s howling. His perplexing condition also includes nightly exclamations about clothes, sport, the weather and a myriad other topics.